`Love On The Run` Plot Slams Into Soap Opera

October 21, 1985|By Clifford Terry, TV/Radio critic.

In March of 1983, William Timothy Kirk--charged with killing two fellow convicts--escaped from Brushy Mountain Prison in Tennessee with the aid of attorney Mary Evans, and the two spent 4 1/2 months as fugitives.

The National Broadcasting Co. tried to buy the rights to Evans` story for a television movie, was rejected and decided to create its own version

``Love on the Run``--scheduled for 8 p.m. Monday on NBC-Ch. 5 opposite ABC-Ch. 7`s Chicago-Green Bay football package, which could very well feature ``McMahon on the Keeper``--stars Stephanie Zimbalist of ``Remington Steele`` as attorney Diana Rockland, a dressed-for-success type who hardly appears to be the fugitive kind.

Unexpectedly, she is assigned to defend Sean Carpenter (Alec Baldwin of

``Knots Landing``), who is in an Ohio prison serving 15 years for six counts of armed robbery and grand theft auto and is now being charged with the murder of two inmates who have been trying to shake him down.

``Bad news from my lawyer,`` he tells his cellmate. ``He wants to quit my case and stick me with some chick. You know what that means, don`t you?`` Of course. ``You gonna fry.``

At first, Rockland regards her client as just another low-life con, but as she prepares her self-defense defense, it quickly becomes evident that he is a sensitive soul. We know this because--screenwriting shorthand here--he quotes poetry. Tennyson, in this case.

He also sees his attorney as a sexually repressed loner. ``Loosen up,``

he lectures, then adds: ``I`ve been threatened with rape, robbery, extortion, death. . . . What I have trouble with is that I haven`t touched another human being with affection in years.``

From then on, ``Love on the Run`` turns into a kind of slammer soap opera with matching dialogue. (She: ``When I ran into you, I realized I was suffocating.`` He: ``Why don`t you say `yes` to life?``)

Sure enough, she quickly is saying `yes` to more than that, taking care of her own personal pro bono work as the two of them get to know each other in the visiting room in the biblical-conjugal sense. The case itself, though, isn`t progressing nearly as well. When she learns from a colleague that ``the D.A. wants this guy`s head,`` she decides that the only thing to do is to take him off.

Despite flat direction by Gus Trikonis (``Hedda & Louella``) and a dreadful script by Sue Grafton and Steve Humphrey, the movie does contain adequate performances by Baldwin and Zimbalist who, in relishing her casting- against-type, has affectionately described her increasingly tough character as ``cheezy.`` The same may be said for the entire effort.

As for Mary Evans, the disbarred lawyer, now 28, was paroled last February after serving 10 months of a three-year sentence and got a job in a Knoxville factory. Earlier this month Kirk, 38, who was sentenced to 40 more years, married another woman in his present maximum security unit.

In the fictionalized version, incidentally, a key change has been made in the attorney`s motivation for throwing away a promising career. In actuality, psychiatrists testified that Evans engineered the escape because she was convinced Kirk could save her from demonic voices in her head and dancing bells of colored light. On television, the reason appears to be sheer lust.

`THE SKIN HORSE`

A decidedly different look at love is provided in ``The Skin Horse`` at 9 p.m. Monday on WTTW-Ch. 11. ``In the world of sexuality,`` says Nabil Shaban, ``there are three genders--female, male and disabled. And what is more, in the disabled we are categorized into `monsters` and `children` . . . either abused or patronized.``

Shaban is a 32-year-old actor who brings first-person experience as the narrator and coauthor of this British documentary that deals with the delicate subject of the problems faced by the severely disabled as they ``try to come to terms with their need to love and make love.``

The results are touching, as thoughts spill out from people whom many would consider to be pathetic and/or grotesque. One man talks tenderly of his gratitude toward the prostitute who freed him from his virginity. A woman

--noting she has been ``trapped`` for 34 years in a place that the English quaintly call the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables--says: ``Sometimes I ache for the human contact I`ve been denied--for a new face that isn`t a nurse or another incurable.`` Another laments, ``Some people see me as an ugly thing. They can`t see me as a being and as a sexual person,`` while Shaban himself puts it more bluntly, remarking that people wonder if he`s ``got one.``

``Some members of our club are extremely vulnerable, and the attacks and innuendos we have to put up with . . . just send them back into their shells,`` says the director of a social club that has been responsible for some ``amazing`` pairings and marriages. ``The thing is, if you`ve got an incomplete body, all you have to offer perhaps is your intellect and your capacity to love.``

While ``The Skin Horse``--the title comes from the children`s book, ``The Velveteen Rabbit,`` which discusses reality and fantasy--is a sensitive, provocative look at a problem that has been kept in shadows, it could be more penetrating in its search--offering, for instance, more words from the people themselves and fewer film clips from the likes of ``The Elephant Man`` and

``Freaks.``

Still, as Betty Rollin says in her introduction, ``although it is an unconventional film that may shock you and make you uncomfortable, stick with it. You might learn something about the severely disabled and even about yourself.``